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Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim Brann, with Stop the War Coalition from London, about foreign nationals fighting in Syria and Iraq threatening to wage devastating wars against their own governments.

Press TV: I would imagine that such videos are meant to instil a certain level of fear in many of these Western governments who are supporting these insurgents?

Brann: Yes. I mean Western governments, and if we just take the British government as a very good example, have got themselves into a real pickle because when it suits them they build up what they call the terrorist threat and when it suits them they tone it down and it is very difficult for them to be seen to be taking a stand that makes any sense and there are examples of heads of British security agencies warning about the danger of people returning from Syria and posing a threat to Britain. But on the other hand, they have a long track record of exaggeration.

I was just looking the other day in about 2007-2008, the heads of the British security service MI5 spoke of first sixteen hundred people they said were plotting in Britain and the following year they said there were two thousand people that they were tracking as a danger. And then suddenly they stopped that. They simply went from being two thousand in organizing something like I think they said three hundred plots down to not-mentioning-it-at-all.

So now they have a situation where there is, I think everybody has to agree there is a definite possibility of danger coming back from Syria and they got themselves into that situation where it is very hard to believe that they are making genuine assessments of the situation.

Press TV: So why isn’t anyone putting a stop to this quite illogical policy of you know for example the UK government as you said because it defies logic that on the one hand you have these insurgents threatening openly these governments after the likes of Syria and Iraq and then these governments turning around and arming these people indirectly?

Brann: Yes that is part of the same thing. That is the contradiction that they can never resolve because it is so full of hypocrisy from the beginning I am talking if you just talk about the so-called global war on terror that was declared by George W. Bush after September 11, 2001. From that moment on to this day they are coating a contradiction of their own making. And sometimes they cannot be seen to be openly backing a side so they effectively give the go ahead to their friends in the region for example.

And at the same time they have to keep quiet about it, they have to speak about how they are not backing any side and so on. While at the same time we know for example, we have just from the words of the British Foreign Secretary William Hague, he said on a number of occasions two and three years ago how Britain was supplying for example he said the radios, he listed in the House of Commons in London, he gave a list of equipment that he was supplying and they gave some kind of assurances that this would not fall into the wrong hands.

But there is no reason to think that they believe they can control who it ends up with.

Press TV: And so going forward Mr. Brann finally, how extreme do you think the backlash will be on the likes of the UK government and UK society as a whole when these insurgents do return home?

Brann: My sense is that on balance, the vast majority will not present the problem because they are quite conscious if they go to Syria or wherever they go they go for that purpose - the vast majority of them.

On the other hand I think and here I would agree with the British security services that the possibility that a number don’t carry out that distinction and do follow the path shown in your video, clearly there is a danger of that and they know that.